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I Want to Fix Goodreads

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Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#181

Post by hombre_fatal »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #143
saralily wrote: post #103

Everyone's talking about recommendations. I don't use GoodReads recommendations at all. It's a social network with a focus on books where people will actually read and discuss books and book reviews. It's also a good way of chronicling what books you read. I wish they'd focus more on that part.

ditto. There's already too many books to read and recommendations everywhere.

Yeah, it's hard for me to take the complaint too seriously. The problem with books isn't that it's hard to find the good ones. It's that you get this tremendous backlog because you're short on time.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#182

Post by johnfn »

taeric wrote: post #94
johnfn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Goodreads will value a million people giving a book 1 star higher than 20k giving it 5 stars. I just sorted by average score. I posted the books in this thread (sorry, on mobile right now).

But that is still a popularity contest, of sorts. In general, any ranking system is a popularity system. Which is logical, as there is no objective ranking of books. That is, it isn't an ordered set. That said, I can see value in providing a score not just in the items, but on the ranking system used. Could even be adaptive based on genre. (Indeed, I would love a system to see if any books have factual errors and suc…

I don’t understand. A book with a single review could place higher than a book with millions. How is that a popularity contest?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#183

Post by johnfn »

SamBam wrote: post #127
johnfn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite jest by David foster wallace and only forwards - forget the author name off the top of my head. Infinite jest is pretty popular these days. The other I have yet to hear anyone say they have read.

Ok, but was Infinite Jest ever an "unknown" book? I'm pretty sure it was one of the most hyped books in the world the year it was written. And I'm pretty sure it's always been in the 4.x's on Goodreads.

I’d never heard of it nor seen it on goodreads till I made my list. I’m sure it’s popular in some circles, but not mine.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#185

Post by ThePadawan »

SECProto wrote: post #179
hipnoizz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the way the current Goodreads rating is supposed to work (and I'm personally OK with it). But my guesstimate is that for 95% Goodreads users everything below 4 stars means that the book sucks.

How do you know that's how the rating system is "supposed" to work?

(Not parent)

If you go to rate a book on good reads and hover over each of the the 5 stars, here are the "title" attributes of the links:

* title="did not like it"

* title="it was ok"

* title="liked it"

* title="really liked it"

* title="it was amazing"

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#186

Post by ryzvonusef »

make it like myanimelist or mydramalist, one of those sort of websites....

such websites were created by fans can cater to what fans care for:

1- Finding out what's coming next, in an easy to view format

2- Finding out what's related to the item I'm currently checking, and it's place in the overall verse's sequence

3- Damn simple tracker for the item I consume

4- Simple rating and genre system

In other words, you want to fix goodreads? create a mybooklist.

Because MAN it is SO hard to find out when my favorite author is having a new book coming out, or if I discover a new author, wtf is their flow of their book series, often ending in me accidentally reading the book out of order.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#187

Post by iamkroot »

johnfn wrote: post #21

Good lord what I wouldn’t give for a better goodreads. Never has so much useful and actionable data been squandered. For example, I could write pages about how bad the “top books” lists are. The Goodreads Choice Awards are purely and literally popularity contests, for example. Why would this be the case - you have millions of user ratings, you should be using those to surface exciting and unknown books rather than th…

Can you share this script?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#188

Post by SECProto »

ThePadawan wrote: post #185
SECProto wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that's how the rating system is "supposed" to work?

(Not parent) If you go to rate a book on good reads and hover over each of the the 5 stars, here are the "title" attributes of the links: * title="did not like it" * title="it was ok" * title="liked it" * title="really liked it" * title="it was amazing"

Interesting, thanks. I use the app mainly, and it doesn't have those descriptors as far as I know.

I think it's interesting to have the middle/neautral rating described (3 star, middle of the range available) as "liked it" (a positive response).

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#189

Post by lkbm »

paxys wrote: post #63

Book rating and recommendations are an impossible problem to begin with. If you browse through Goodreads, you will see that everything is rated 4 stars. People only finish and rate books they like, and it's impossible to compare books of different genres, lengths, time periods, complexity etc. on the same objective scale like it is for movies or TV shows.

So look at which books I finished and rated highly, find people who overlap strongly with that, and recommend the set of {their books - my books}.

As I recall, this is basically what won the Netflix recommendation engine contest. There's going to be a lot of computation in crunching the numbers, but it's not hard to come up with something better than "recommend what has the highest average star rating".

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#190

Post by taeric »

johnfn wrote: post #182
taeric wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is still a popularity contest, of sorts. In general, any ranking system is a popularity system. Which is logical, as there is no objective ranking of books. That is, it isn't an ordered set. That said, I can see value in providing a score not just in the items, but on the ranking system used. Could even be adaptive based on genre. (Indeed, I would love a system to see if any books have factual errors and suc…

I don’t understand. A book with a single review could place higher than a book with millions. How is that a popularity contest?

Depends on who reviewed it.

Easier to think of this from the other side. I have a few friends that, if they tell me to avoid something, it can typically override however popular something may be.

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